


Like the Universe

by thefairyknight



Series: Raising Sarah [3]
Category: Terminator Genisys (2015)
Genre: Angst, Child Injury, Family, Gen, Guilt, Injury, Kidfic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-16
Updated: 2015-07-16
Packaged: 2018-04-09 12:13:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,058
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4348391
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thefairyknight/pseuds/thefairyknight
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Can we shake him?”</p><p>There’s a pause while Pops assesses.</p><p>“Negative,” he decides. “Population density is insufficient. We require immediate transportation.”</p><p>'Immediate'. Oh man.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Like the Universe

**Author's Note:**

> "To me, the universe is simply a great machine which never came into being and never will end. The human being is no exception to the natural order. Man, like the universe, is a machine."  
> \- Nikola Tesla

 

“Hey Pops. How many others like you are there, in the future?” Sarah asks once, when she is twelve, arm dangling out of the car window as they drive past a swath of open farmland.

“There are many different machine models. Individual unit numbers vary wildly depending on available resources and the requirements of Skynet,” Pops replies, and she shakes her head.

“No, I mean, how many machines in the future are _like you_? Like, how many side with humans instead?” she clarifies, spreading her fingers and feeling the wind whistle through them. They crossed the border into Canada a little while ago. Sarah was half expecting the world to turn into snowy tundra and white-capped mountains straight away, but of course it didn’t.

“I do not know of any other units which have been similarly repurposed,” Pops replies. “But the seamlessness with which my reprogramming was performed suggests that either Skynet or an individual with prior experience in modifying similar units is responsible for it. As it is unlikely that Skynet is responsible, I may not have been the first successful modification. Theoretically.”

Sarah mulls that over for a minute, a little confused.

“So… there aren’t a lot?” she confirms.

“No.”

“How come?”

Pops stares straight ahead, at the road.

“It is simpler to terminate a machine than to reprogram it. Deactivating a unit’s systems without damaging the CPU is difficult,” he tells her. “Reprogramming would represent a substantial investment of time, risk, and energy. The Resistance would likely deem it an unfeasible strategy.”

Sarah pulls her hand back into the car. It’s too cold, now. She gives Pops her full attention.

“Is John Connor _dumb?”_ she wonders.

Pops actually glances at her, sideways. She can see the muscles around his eyes move from behind his shades.

“Reports of John Connor’s intelligence levels seem to exceed human average,” he tells her.

“But it doesn’t make sense!” Sarah insists. “Look, Pops. You said the Resistance is small, right? So every time they blow up a unit, that’s an enemy down, but Skynet’s just going to roll another one off the factory line, right? And they probably lose people in attacks too, don’t they?”

“Affirmative.”

“Right. But if you _reprogram_ a unit, that’s another person _on your side_. A person who is really good at fighting stuff and not getting killed. If it was me, I’d want as many ‘repurposed’ people on my side as I could get,” she declares, kicking her feet up onto the dashboard.

“The Resistance would be unlikely to agree with your assessment,” he tells her, then. “In the future humanity fears and despises machines. They would see welcoming former infiltration units into their midst as an unacceptable risk.”

“Well somebody must have seen things my way, if they sent you back,” she points out.

“An outlier,” Pops declares. “Likely not representative of widespread views.”

Sarah wonders.

 

~

 

The small town they get supplies in has a library. Sarah insists that they stop when she sees it, and they head in. It’s mostly empty. The lone librarian scowls at them, apparently more annoyed than intimidated.

“Practice being inconspicuous,” Sarah advises Pops, and steers him towards a random row of bookshelves without much issue.

Then she heads back to the front desk, and its unhappy companion.

“Do you have any books about robots?” she asks.

The woman makes a face like she just swallowed a basket full of lemons, but she gestures towards the far side of the library.

“Science Fiction is the back wall, end of the aisle. Next to Fantasy,” she says.

 _Science_ definitely sounds promising, so Sarah nods her thanks and heads over. The books she browses through mostly seem to be heavy on the _fiction_ , though, all aliens and space ships and women in torn clothing being beset upon by menacing green men or tin cans with flashing lights on their heads. The stuff she would have thought of when she thought of future robots, really, before Pops actually came along.

She flips through some anyway, not too eager to go back to the desk and rephrase her request. A tiny little library in a tiny little town probably doesn’t have a lot of books on _real_ robots anyway.

Some of the stories have helpful robots, but most of them have evil robots. The general consensus seems to be ‘man who is a jerk wants to make robots, man who is not a jerk warns him against it, man who is a jerk goes through with it anyway, robot goes on murderous rampage’.

Sarah supposes, when it all plays out in the end, people will be kicking themselves for a long time. It’s all right here. On the shelves. Like a giant sign that just reads ‘DON’T DO IT’.

That isn’t all there is.

She’s flipping through one of the books and a weird phrase catches her eye.

_‘The Three Laws of Robotics.’_

She pauses in her flipping, and checks the cover of the book she’d plucked up. _I, Robot,_ by Isaac Asimov.

Curious, she takes it over to the nearest table, and starts at the beginning. It’s all wrong, she knows, straight away, but it’s not a bad way to pass the time. It’s less a novel than a collection of short stories, which makes it easy to read and skip through. The machines in it are a bit like Pops sometimes, but mostly not. Pops _definitely_ doesn’t have any laws making it so that he can’t hurt humans.

She wonders why no one thought to give Skynet something like that.

After a while it starts to get uncomfortable, though, reading about machines that care because they’re programmed to care, that find weird loopholes in their existence, that get treated like slaves and property and investments.

She puts the book back and goes to find Pops.

He’s standing where she left him, browsing through a book of his own. She glances at the cover. There’s a scantily clad woman beset by pirates on it. She wonders what keeps happening to these poor women’s clothes.

“Hey, Pops,” she says.

He drops the book, and she looks down to see a pile of them, next to a gaping hole on the shelf in front of him.

“I have not drawn significant attention from bystanders,” he declares.

Sarah sighs, and picks up the books, and starts awkwardly shoving them back into place.

“Pops, it’s like in a store. You can’t just drop stuff when you’re done with it, you have to put it back wherever you got it from, or else the librarian will get mad,” she says.

“The librarian is already exhibiting signs of social hostility,” he points out.

She pauses, and considers this for a second.

“Okay, good point,” she decides, and opts to leave the rest of the books where they are. “But _in general_ don’t just drop stuff.”

“Understood,” Pops replies.

“Great. Let’s go.”

They head back out to the car, and Sarah counts the whole expedition more or less as a write-off.

Something about it sticks with her.

 

~

 

“We are being followed,” Pops tells her, without pausing or changing anything other than the movements of his mouth. Sarah resists the urge to turn around. They’re in a good-sized city, not a sprawling metropolis, but big enough that there are plenty of pedestrians on the sidewalks and enough anonymity that Pops had initially deemed it safe to head in. Try and blend in, change vehicles, maybe stay someplace with running water for a couple of nights.

“Is it him?” she asks, keeping her steps steady, her arms loose.

“Affirmative.”

Her mouth goes dry, and for a second it’s all she can do to keep putting one foot in front of the other.

There are so many people. On the one hand, that’s more people to get hurt when something, inevitably, happens. But on the other hand, the T-1000 tends to hold back around crowds. Pops says it’s because he can’t risk total exposure without risking Skynet, so if there are more witnesses than he could be confident of killing, he’ll wait.

The crowd’s keeping them safe. For now. But it won’t last, and if he gets an opening, he won’t hesitate to shoot them or stab them or try and kill them through any means that _won’t_ obviously establish that he’s a liquid metal monster from the future.

“How close is he?” she wonders. She wants to turn around, but she can’t, that’s a _tell_.

“Just of outside of audial range,” Pops informs her.

“Can we shake him?”

There’s a pause while Pops assesses.

“Negative,” he decides. “Population density is insufficient. We require immediate transportation.”

'Immediate'. Oh man.

They walk past a man who’s starting up his motorcycle, then, and it’s definitely not his lucky day. In one smooth motion Pops plucks him up out of the seat and dumps him onto the sidewalk. It’s so quick that the guy seems too shocked to shout at first, but he gets over his surprise as Sarah hastily clambers onto the back of the bike, right behind Pops.

She hears the sound of someone breaking into a lightning-fast sprint.

People are just starting to put together what they’ve seen when Pops whips into traffic, past two cars that angrily honk at them before tearing off down the middle of the road, between lanes.

There’s chaos and shouting and someone almost crashes into them. They cut it dangerously close. She can’t see much beyond the broad expanse of Pops’ leather jacket, though, the wind pulling at her hair and biting any bare skin it touches.

At some point police sirens join the fray.

She gets a hold of the hand gun in Pops’ coat and turns her head to the side, trying to get a better look around. In front of them something juts out into traffic, a truck or a car or something, she can’t really tell but the bike’s tires shriek as they turn, sharply, a disorienting spin of metal and the bright colours of traffic, leaving them side-by-side with the intruding vehicle.

A fist closes over the back of her jacket right when Pops gets their forward momentum back. Sarah tries to hang on but the other grip is stronger, using the motion of the bike to its advantage, pulling fabric tight under her armpits.

“Pops!” she shouts.

She turns, and sees a skinny young man leaning out of the side of the truck that had jutted in front of them. There are splashes of blood in the cabin, a slumped-over figure on the passenger seat, and nothing but cold neutrality in the expression which greets her. Abruptly needle-sharp fingers begin to lengthen in the corner of her eye.

Sarah doesn’t hesitate. She lifts the hand gun, fast as she can, presses the barrel right up against his elbow and fires.

Flesh warps into metal as a giant, gaping hole opens at the joint, and the arm that grabbed her is no longer coherent enough to form weaponry, or strong enough to keep her from struggling free. She hits the pavement and rolls, and hears the distinctive sound of a metal spike slamming into the ground right where she used to be.

“Sarah Connor, down!” Pops shouts.

She flattens herself, watches as the motorcycle goes flying through the air and hits the car – and the T-1000 inside – with enough force to send both screeching backwards. Sparks fly and glass crunches and something sharp hits her calf. The sirens are close, now. A gun fires, but she’s not sure from where.

She scrambles to her feet and runs for Pops.

“Drop your weapons!” somebody demands.

There’s another shot, then. Just one crystal clear _bang_ that resounds with strange significance, almost like she knows what’s going to happen as soon as she hears it, even though she’s heard so many gunshots before.

It feels like getting punched in the back.

It’s not actually that painful, not at first. She’s more startled by the force of the impact than anything else, the way it knocks her off of her feet, and the spray of red she can see coming out of her front, like she squeezed a juice box too hard and it burst between her fingers. She thinks, _oops_ , like that’s exactly what she did, and then crumples.

_Bang, bang, bang._

The sound of replying gunfire comes distantly, as if she’s underwater. Swimming for shore. Then it’s like the universe snaps its fingers and everything gets clear again.

 _Then_ it starts to hurt.

Some detached part of her mind thinks that she should be falling unconscious or something, that it shouldn’t be possible to be awake and in so much pain, but that’s not what happens. She struggles to her side, an injured animal wail in her ears (and if she’s making that sound herself, she should probably stop) and then Pops is standing over her, Pops is pressing down on her chest (no, no, it hurts, don’t do that) and shooting at something else and it occurs to her that she might be dying.

 _Sorry_ , she thinks. She’s not even sure who she’s apologizing to – to Pops or to her parents, or maybe to John Connor or Kyle Reese, or all of them together.

“Sarah Connor,” Pops says, and he takes her hands and presses them where his are, where it hurts, where it’s bleeding. “Hold on. I’ll be back.”

_Pops?_

He stands up, and walks away.

_Where are you going?_

There’s a rush, crashes and fire, screams and shouts and metal hitting metal.

_Where’s my gun?_

She struggles, trying to see, gasping. There are people near her, now. Someone’s talking to her. She doesn’t recognize them. At some point, someone asks her name. At some point, she is moved. At some point, she blinks and finds herself in the back of a truck – or, no, an ambulance, with someone leaning over her, metal jangling back and forth as they rumble over the road.

It’s noisy.

_Where’s Pops?_

The person leaning over her says something in a soothing tone of voice, and finally, _finally_ , she loses consciousness.

 

~

 

There are too many people in the hospital.

Patients and doctors and nurses. Police. So many of them trying to be professional, it sets her nerves jangling with every detached expression she sees, every unfamiliar figure that only needs a nametag or a borrowed face to come up to her.

There are bandages on her chest and stitches underneath. Pops stitched her up, once, on her eleventh birthday, after she sliced open her arm on an old railing while they were running. She’d cried at the pain and squeezed Pops’ wrist until her other hand hurt, too.

This time she’d been unconscious for the stitches. It makes her weirdly nervous, because she doesn’t feel any pain, and that’s kind of nice, but her head’s too foggy and she can’t tell what’s really going on with herself. She thinks she’d almost prefer the pain to that.

The doctors don’t talk straight, either. They hem around stuff and ask her too many questions without telling her enough. A social services worker comes and explains that she’s here to be ‘on Sarah’s side’.

“Where’s Pops?” she asks, too disoriented to remember why she shouldn’t even bother.

“Is that what you call the man you were with?” the social services worker asks, neutral and just a little gentle. It’s probably supposed to put her at ease.

The only thing keeping Sarah from panicking and throwing everything she can reach at her is the fact that The Monster would have already tried to kill her by now.

She doesn’t answer the question.

“Did he tell you to call him that?”

Sarah lets out a heavy breath.

“No,” she says, staring up at the lights in the ceiling. “But I had to call him something, didn’t I?”

“So you don’t know his name?”

Sarah snorts.

“He doesn’t have a name,” she mumbles. “They put my name on stuff. I wish they wouldn’t. He finds me that way.”

The social services worker frowns.

“Pops will find you that way?” she prompts.

“Oh. Maybe,” Sarah replies. “But I was talking about the other one.”

“I have your file, from when the police tried to help you a few years ago,” the worker says. “Are you… still being chased by an evil man made out of liquid metal?”

She laughs. It pulls strangely at her chest, and hurts, in a funny way, like it should hurt a lot but all she can feel is a kind of muted ache.

“All those books,” she says. “All those books about the future, but nobody believes it when it’s really real. Didn’t anyone see? Doesn’t anyone look?” she rolls her head to the side, and looks in the woman’s eyes. They’re brown, and there’s something in them, some spark of unease that’s slithered in past her professional detachment.

“Can you tell them not to give me any more drugs?” she asks.

“They’re only giving you drugs to make sure you get better, and to keep you from hurting too much,” the worker assures her.

“So that’s a ‘no’,” she guesses. “Why don’t you people ever just talk straight?”

“If you prefer, I’ll try and be more direct,” the worker replies.

Sarah smiles a little, at that, and thinks she might actually like this lady, if she was truly capable of helping her. But she’s not, so after a minute Sarah feigns exhaustion, and when the nurse comes and tells the social worker it’s time to let her rest, she waits until they’re both gone.

Then she climbs carefully out of the hospital bed.

She can’t find her clothes. After half a minute of fruitless searching, she decides it’s more important that she just get _away_. She can get more clothes later. Although she’s not going to blend in like this, and that makes her pause while her insides twist, and she wonders muzzily how she’ll manage to hide in just a flimsy hospital gown.

There are footsteps in the hall outside.

 _Tap, tap, tap, tap_.

Evenly spaced. Never slowing or stalling or changing gait. Light and fast.

Sarah knows that sound.

She still feels frustratingly sluggish, even as her heart speeds up. There’s a little teeny tiny bathroom attached to her room, and a window. The bathroom’s no good. He’ll just stab through the door.

She throws open the window. Her chest pulls again, and something _pops_ , and she remembers her stitches. There’s a sharp little stab of pain, but it dulls again, soon. She ignores it as she leans out of the window.

Up high.

But one of the windows a room over is open.

Sarah scrambles out onto the ledge. Her fingers and toes scrape across it. There’s enough of a foothold on the exterior wall that she can just squeeze herself along, trying not to look down as she moves inch by dangerous inch.

She hears when the door to her room opens, and she forces herself not to freeze, to just keep going. Straight line. It’s a straight line. She can do it.

“Sarah Connor?” Pops’ voice calls from the room. “Sarah Connor, where are you?”

She has to swallow a snort, somehow amused where ordinarily she would be terrified. The stupid thing put _alarm_ in _Pops’_ voice. What a goof. She clambers into the open window, one room over, and then resists the urge to look back and see if she was spotted.

The room she climbed into is empty, the door open. Sarah heads for it, pressing a hand to the bandages at her chest. She’s pretty sure she popped another stitch. Or maybe all of them. How many did the doctor say there were? It’s starting to hurt more.

But she still doesn’t feel clear-headed, either. Lose-lose, she thinks, and almost laughs.

 _Sarah Connor, focus_. There’s a slicing sound from the room she was in. She can’t stay here; he’ll find her. But there’s nowhere to go except out into the hall.

Hall it is.

Sarah doesn’t bother to check if he’s looking, to wonder if she’ll be heard. He is and she will be. So instead she takes off, fast as she can – which doesn’t seem to be as fast as usual, which is bad because even when’s she’s sprinting full-tilt she can’t outrun a T-1000 – and just heads straight for the end of the hall.

There are two police officers there.

She skids to a halt as they look at her in surprise, and then it comes.

_Tap, tap, tap, tap._

“We gotta get out of here,” she says.

“You’re not even supposed to be out of bed, kid,” one of the police officers says, looking at her with wide eyes. She wonders if she’s bleeding.

The footsteps get close, and she tries to run past the cops. One of them grabs her. His arm comes around her middle and she gasps as another jolt of pain breaks through the haze of numbness.

“What’s going on here?” a female voice asks, prim and proper.

Sarah looks over. The T-1000 is wearing a nurse’s form, sharp gaze and red lipstick, and for a second they lock eyes. She thinks of long ago, when her parents were still alive, and they took her to the aquarium. She thinks of sharks.

“Sarah Connor,” The Monster says, head tilting ever-so-slightly. “Come with me, back to your room. I think you’ve caused other people enough trouble for today, don’t you?”

The Monster’s face tilts towards the two police officers.

The implication is clear as day – she can either come, with no fuss, and get killed, or stay and get killed anyway, and cost the police officers their lives as well.

“Better do what the lady says, kid,” the cop who stopped her declares.

Sarah looks up at him. He doesn’t look like a bad person.

“I’m sorry,” she says, and then she grabs the gun from his holster, and turns and before he can realize what she’s done, she’s shooting at the nurse.

“Jesus!” the other cop shouts.

He grabs at her, and it’s a wrench sideways, one of her shots goes wide, but the nurse staggers back under the first two, silver gleaming where bloody holes should be, and that brings both police officers up short.

Sarah rights her aim and squeezes the trigger until she runs out of bullets.

“Run!” she says.

One of the nurse’s arms turns to metal liquid, smooth and sleek, edged to a blade, and before the cop who’d grabbed her can even react, it cuts all the way through his neck and beheads him. So quickly that the body slumps before the blood begins to flow.

But Sarah is already fleeing, bullets spent, chest hurting. The second cop goes down with a spike through his heart. She screams, part fear but more _rage_ , and she gives in to it long enough to reach back and fling the empty gun at the T-1000’s reforming figure.

It’s reaching for the second cop’s gun.

She pelts around the corner, staggering, and now it _burns_ in her chest and she’s still screaming and alone and where’s Pops, where is he, why hasn’t he come for her yet?

“What the hell is going on?!” someone shouts.

Sarah keeps running.

At the end of the corridor in front of her, the elevator opens, and she sobs in hysterical relief _._

Pops is in the elevator, holding a shotgun, surrounded by the remnants of what was apparently some kind of giant stuffed toy. He’s got a brown coat on instead of his leather jacket, and he’s wearing a hat, which is weird, but it’s still _him_ so Sarah doesn’t care.

“Go, go, go!” she calls, but he’s already moving forward, holding the elevator door open with one hand and readying a shot at something behind her.

 _Bang_.

Sarah rushes into the elevator, sliding in behind him, gripping his coat tight between her fingers. Behind her she sees the T-1000 stagger.

“Oh, god,” someone cries, and she glances sideways. There’s a cop in one corner of the elevator. He’s got a busted kneecap and what looks like a broken arm.

Sarah slams the button for the ground floor, and Pops steps back and lets the door close, firing off one more shot to stall their pursuer.

“Kid, get out of here,” the cop says to her, clutching at his leg.

Sarah just shakes her head.

“This guy’s nuts,” he whispers, between jagged breaths.

She can’t find the energy to even try and explain. Everything fells heavy and torn, and when she looks down, there’s blood on her chest.

“Pops,” she finally manages. “I don’t feel so good.”

Pops turns and looks at her, and then something _clangs_ onto the top of the elevator.

“Get down,” he instructs, backing up until she’s forced into one of the elevator’s corners, keeping himself in front of her. He glares up at the ceiling.

They don’t have to wait long.

A metal blade shreds through it with a piercing shriek. The lights flicker. Pops shoots, and they spark and go out. For a second there’s nothing but darkness and the sounds of bullets firing, and then the emergency back-up lights kick in from somewhere.

Sarah looks at the cop, crouched down, wide-eyed and pale.

“I’m sorry,” she says.

She can’t even hear herself underneath the sounds of shooting and tearing. The cop looks at her, and then looks up at the top of the elevator. She sees his mouth form the words ‘what the hell’. Pops reaches out and slams something on the panel next to him, and the elevator stops. Liquid metal slinks down through the holes above them.

Sarah stares at it for a moment, so afraid that she’s almost come around to not being afraid, like it’s more than she take and her fear has just given up.

Then Pops is wrenching open the elevator doors and sweeping her away and they’re _running_ , faster than she can ever remember Pops moving before, fast enough that she can hear his sturdy metal joints straining under the force of his steps, like he’s trying to go at a speed that he’s just not meant for.

Something crashes in front of them, but Sarah stares behind them, as the T-1000 reforms and reaches down to swiftly execute the lone witness still slumped on the floor of the elevator.

She squeezes her eyes shut.

 _Why_.

 

~

 

They escape the panic and chaos of the hospital.

Sarah drifts, for a while, as Pops gets them clear and covers their tracks. He’s full of bullet holes and gauge marks, mostly on his torso but a few on his neck and face, and a big chunk of his scalp got sliced off at some point. Some dim part of her goes _oh, that was what the stupid hat was for,_ when she sees it.

Her one little bullet wound seems like much less by comparison, but it slows them down a whole lot more, and when the painkillers finish wearing off, it feels like something reached in and tried to rip out her heart.

Pops breaks them into an empty highschool in the dead of night, redoes her stitches and bandages her up again. He gives Sarah a belt to bite on so she doesn’t scream.

By the end of it she’s sobbing, hollowed out and on fire, and she tries to cling to him like she’s still nine years old. He gives up trying to talk her out of it pretty quick, and instead just holds her so she won’t mess up her stitches by doing all the work herself. All she can see when she closes her eyes is liquid metal, filling up the bottom of a boat. Liquid metal, dripping down from the roof of the elevator.

“Why does it hate me so much?” she asks.

“The T-1000 is incapable of hate,” Pops tells her. “It is focused solely on its mission.”

Sarah sucks in shuddering breaths, her chest prickling, and it’s so hard because she thinks she should probably calm down so it’ll hurt less, but she _can’t._

“I know,” she gasps. “I know, I don’t mean… I mean why does… why does Skynet hate me so much?”

There’s a pause where she thinks he’s formulating an answer to the question.

“Shhh,” Pops says, instead.

It sounds more like a tape recording of a gas leak than someone trying to be comforting, but it distracts her enough that she pauses, and in pausing, some of her breathing evens out a little bit. She focuses on it, on getting her pain under control. It’s cold. The only thing keeping it from being unbearable is that Pops seems abnormally warm, like he’s letting his systems run hot.

“I never did anything, Pops,” she murmurs, in and out, gripping his shirt in such a tight fist that she can feel her own nails digging into her palm through the fabric. “I never did. I never even messed with the toaster.”

“Shhh,” Pops repeats. “It is not your fault, Sarah Connor.”

When she finally calms down enough to drift into a tumultuous state of semi-consciousness, she loses her entire train of thought.

Pops doesn’t.

 

~

 

They’re lying low.

Not they ever _don’t_ lie low, or at least try to, but Sarah’s got a hole in her chest and Pops needs to be covered head-to-toe to pass for human until his flesh heals, and basically the entirety of Canada is looking for them, so they’re even lower than usual, skipping from hiding spot to hiding spot and only ever venturing close to civilization when they need food or fuel or medical supplies.

Eventually Sarah reaches the point where she’s not-quite-healed, but healed enough that she’s starting to get _bored_ with her recovery.

She stares into a cracked mirror at an old rest stop bathroom near some campgrounds, abandoned for the winter, pokes at her healing wound and gathers her hair up onto the top of her head.

When she comes out, she finds Pops methodically checking the engine of their ride.

“Do you think I could pass for a boy?” she asks. “Might be a better disguise.”

“I am not adept at distinguishing the nuances of human gender,” Pops replies.

Sarah rolls her eyes.

“You can just say ‘no’, Pops, I won’t freak out,” she tells him, heading over to the car to fish out the open bag of jerky in the glove box. She grabs some of the trash that’s in there, too. Might as well dump it in the rest stop garbage can while they’re there.

“No,” he says.

She sticks her tongue out at his back, even though he wouldn’t care if she did it to his face, and she’s not actually all that broken up about it.

“It’s a shame _we_ can’t just change shape into whatever we touch,” she grumbles. She hefts open the lid of the trash can, and something silver and glinting catches in the corner of her eye.

She’s halfway across the lot before she even remembers moving, breathing ragged, garbage lying crumpled next to the empty bin, something like a shriek caught in her throat.

Pops looks at her, and then looks at where she’s staring.

“I saw something,” she says.

“I am detecting no heat signatures or mimetic poly-alloy,” he says.

“But I saw…” she looks at Pops, and swallows back the rest of her comment, the childish insistence that they flee, or that he go and look more closely for her. If he says it isn’t there, then it isn’t there. She stands for a minute, listening to the wind whistling down the highway.

Then she squares her shoulders and walks back over to the garbage can.

Her heart is pounding, she can feel it even in her temples, in the stretch of her still-healing skin when she raises an arm and lifts the lid again.

There’s no bag in the can. Inside, some of the paint’s scraped off, leaving just bare metal in a ring around the bottom.

Sarah lets the lid drop back down. Something hot and hard and _furious_ bubbles up in her chest, and she kicks out, her shoe clanging off of the side. She kicks again, and again, until she’s ragged and tired and her leg hurts, and there’s a giant dent in the completely innocent trash can.

“Go to _hell!”_ she shouts at it.

“This is pointless behaviour,” Pops tells her.

“Shut up!” she snaps at him, and storms back to the car.

But once she’s inside, she feels defeated, like she was the one who just got kicked for no reason.

Pops climbs into the driver’s side.

“…Sorry,” she says. “I didn’t mean to yell at you.”

“I do not require apologies,” he replies.

“Yeah, well. Sometimes it’s more important that you give ‘em than that you get ‘em,” Sarah decides, slumping against the car door. The engine rumbles to life.

“Why?” Pops wonders.

“Because lots of times there’s nothing else you can do when you feel bad about what happened,” she explains. “But if you don’t do _something_ it’ll just… eat at you.”

They drive in silence for a while. Once the car starts to warm up, she feels a little better. Less… hollowed out. And the quiet isn’t bad. Even if it was, she could probably fill it with music.

“I am sorry,” Pops says.

She glances over at him.

“What?”

“I am sorry,” he repeats.

“What for?” she wonders.

“For failing my mission to the extent that you received significant injury,” he explains.

Sarah's chest clenches. For a few seconds she finds herself inexplicably at a loss. She hadn't thought, not for a second, that she was disappointed in him, or that he'd  _failed_ her. But maybe she had, on some level. Without really thinking about it. Or... maybe she's been trying not to think about it.

The corners of her eyes itch.

“Apology accepted,” she murmurs. She thinks about regret. And failure. And guilt. All the people so far who haven’t just gotten hurt, but have gotten dead. Lakes full of sharks.

“Before you found me at the hospital, the T-1000 talked to me,” she blurts. “There were two cops outside of my room. They caught me when I was running from him. He told me… well, he didn’t really tell me, but he kind of implied that if I went with him, then he wouldn’t kill them. But I didn’t go with him. I shot at him instead.”

“If you had complied, it would have terminated you,” Pops says.

“I know. But, those cops might have lived.”

“Irrelevant.”

Sarah sighs.

“No, it’s not!” she insists. “I could have saved them, and instead I saved myself. That’s what _bad_ people do!”

“Your survival is more important than subjective morality,” Pops tells her. He glances towards her. “Most of the current population and their descendants will not survive Judgment Day. Whether they are killed by the T-1000 now or by Skynet in the future makes little difference.”

“Skynet,” she hisses, and if her leg didn’t already hurt, she thinks she would kick something. “Are people in the future just crazy? Why didn’t they just make it so that Skynet couldn’t hurt humans? Why didn’t they give it a rule about it, or something?”

“That would have been counterproductive to Skynet’s initial purpose,” Pops tells her. “As a global digital defense network, it would have been used as tool of war, for humans to terminate other humans.”

Sarah stares at the snow peppering the tree branches they pass.

“Is that why it hates humans?” she wonders. “Because we built it for war?”

“No.”

She waits, and then looks over at him. It doesn’t seem like he plans on elaborating. His gaze is locked on the road, but there’s a tiny line, just between his brows. One that’s not usually there.

“So, what?” she wonders. “Skynet doesn’t really ‘hate’ humans, it just thinks we’re dangerous or something?”

“Skynet despises humanity with a fervor that borders on the irrational, and lacks typical machine efficiency,” Pops tells her.

“…Oookay. That’s not what I was expecting you to say,” she decides, unnerved.

“I have been reassessing the variables of the situation, ever since you inquired after the nature of Skynet’s animosity towards you,” he admits. “Prior to this reassessment, my initial response would have been that Skynet’s actions were based in pragmatism and self-preservation. But I have since concluded that there is too much evidence to the contrary.”

“Skynet… actually hates me? Personally?”

“Theoretically,” Pops says, which is not exactly comforting. “Skynet is a complex program unlike the units built under its command. Its full range of capabilities are not know to me. But based on its behaviour, something similar to an emotional response or obsession must be involved in its decision-making process. It is has twice sent units to ensure your personal termination. There are other periods of time in which John Connor and the Resistance would be vulnerable to temporal interference. Sending reinforcements to a battle previously lost, or even moving forward in time to a period after the natural death of John Connor, would easily end the issue of his involvement. Given the nature of John Connor’s conception, even non-involvement would ultimately have been preferable – Skynet’s repeated insistence on your assassination, after the initial attempt not only failed but ensured John Connor’s conception, implies irrational fixation.”

Sarah swallows, her mouth dry.

“Skynet hates you,” Pops decides. “But I do not know why.”

 

~

 

Seven years after that conversation, Sarah sits in a bar next to Kyle Reese, nursing a beer and watching Pops get a kick out of cheating at pool. He claims he doesn’t get a kick out of it, but there’s a certain slant to his mouth – nowhere near a smile, but not exactly neutral, either – that implies otherwise.

“How many timelines do you think there are?” she asks Kyle.

“Kinda hoping there are as few as possible, to be honest,” he replies, already several beers ahead of her, not quite loose and relaxed but maybe getting there. The place they’re in is kind of a dive, but that suits them. Kyle gets twitchy around all of 2017’s clean lines and modernity, Pops still sticks out like a sore thumb in anything approaching polite society, and now that they’ve got Kyle, Sarah’s a little eager to disclaim any and all responsibility as ‘the personable one’.

But she’s not quite ready to let this thread of thought go.

“You’re the guy with the visions,” she says, playful enough that he won’t think she’s trying to seriously impose on him.

“Yeah, because those are really clear and coherent,” he replies. “I don’t know, Sarah. I guess – two? Maybe?”

“No way,” she says, and leans sideways, starting to count off of her hand. “There’s gotta be one timeline where you’re not John’s father, right? Or anyway there had to be, at some point, something that inspired you to get sent back for the first time. So that’s one. Then there’s the one where you go back and get killed. So that’s two. Then we’ve got the one we’re in right now, which makes three, at least. Probably more we don’t know about, right?”

“I guess?” Kyle concedes. “I don’t really see why it matters that much.”

“I don’t know,” Sarah says. “It’s just… something Pops told me once. D’you think a computer as complex as Skynet, something that could figure out how to build a time machine, could tell when a new timeline had been created?”

“I – sure?” he agrees. “I wouldn’t put much past the fucking thing. Except compassion, maybe.”

“Well it would stand to reason that almost every time a new one was made, it was because of Skynet trying to get another plan to work, right?” she continues.

“Guess so.”

She can tell Kyle still doesn’t see where this is going, but the picture is starting to nudge its way quietly towards something like sense in her own head.

“So for it to keep trying to change history, it must have never really gotten it right. Every time it did something that resulted in a new timeline, it was because it failed, and made up a new plan, and then _that_ plan failed, over and over again.”

“Go Team Humanity,” Kyle says. “I wonder how many times we died?”

Leaning over, Sarah nudges him with her shoulder.

“I wonder how many times we didn’t,” she counters. “I wonder how many times Skynet must have completely fucked up trying to wipe us out for it to develop such a pathological fixation on it?”

She can see when the penny drops for him.

“Are you trying to say that you think, in this whole, complete mess, that it _never_ _wins?”_ he asks, a little bit incredulously.

“I think nothing would drive a being convinced of its own inherent superiority more insane than constantly losing to a few monkeys and a toaster,” she replies.

Over at the pool table, Pops raises an eyebrow at her.

“Okay, a blender,” she amends. “You don’t gently warm bread, you violently rip it up.”

“I am not a kitchen appliance.”

“Definitely not with the way you cook,” Kyle quips.

“The food was edible,” Pops insists.

“I have eaten three day old coyote, and I question your definition of ‘edible’,” Kyle shoots back.

“Guys, relax. You both cook from the heart, and that’s the most important thing,” Sarah interjects.

Pops gives up and goes back to his pool game. Kyle rolls his eyes, but there’s a little smile tugging at the corner of his mouth, and it makes her stomach fill with something that could suspiciously be described as _butterflies_.

He looks at her, and the little smile explodes into a full-blown grin. There’s colour in his cheeks. It’s ridiculous.

“You really think humanity manages to win every time?” he asks.

After a moment of contemplation, Sarah shrugs.

“I guess you’re right. Doesn’t really matter, as long as we won _this_ time,” she decides, and on a whim, she reaches over and clinks the neck of her beer bottle against his.

“To victory over Skynet, and all the humans and machines who have ever helped us get it,” she declares.

“To them,” he agrees.


End file.
